Ineptitude At Its Finest

I love Jon Stewart, simply put. The Daily Show is the only thing I’m willing to subject myself to on television. You would have to lobotomize me with an ice cream scoop and maybe even bang around in there a bit with a pair of egg beaters before I could even find anything else on TV entertaining. If I am reincarnated as a dung beetle I’ll fill up on TV, but for now, I’ll continue to find my guilty pleasures elsewhere.
What I have grown to like more than anything else on the show are the political interviews. Jon Stewart is an intelligent man, a fact most people won’t deny. I appreciate the fact that he can utter polysyllabic words, toss out historical and political references at will, and then tie them all together with whoopee cushions and hand buzzers. The man is a comedian first and foremost, and he’ll be the first person to say it.
And that’s the whole point. The other night I watched the Eric Cantor interview and what struck me was Cantor’s inability to defend himself or anything he stood for. He threw out platitude after platitude, but Stewart just kept shooting them down like clay pigeons, and then Cantor would tread air for a little bit until he’d finally sputter out like Wiley Coyote. At one point I thought I could see him writhing inside with anger like a Tickle-Me-Elmo tossed in a full bath, but he composed himself to give a long winded diatribe about the fading American dream that had all the flare of a high school football halftime speech.
So now back to the point. Jon Stewart is a comedian, an intelligent one no doubt about it, but nonetheless a comedian, yet somehow, time and time again, politicians have gone on his show and left stumbling around as if someone had just shot their seeing eye dog. With Cantor, I felt as if he couldn’t even have beaten up on a Sunday morning liberal coffee clatch. He was full of “change” and “baby, please take me back” talk, but really he had nothing other than the same old republican shit, but he hadn’t even bothered to spruce it up and pick the corn out of it.
Jon Stewarts a comedian and a gadfly, not the type of person who should be able to topple politicians. I say this in full respect of the man and I think he would agree. It’s not that Jon Stewart is such a great interviewer, it’s the ineptitude of the people he faces. As much as I like him, we don’t need anymore Jon Stewarts, what we need are people intelligent enough to debate him.